News Comment/COMENTARI AL DIA

The Catalan Bourgeoisie, from Spain to the World/LA BURGESIA CATALANA, D’ESPANYA AL MÓN

The Catalan Bourgeoisie, from Spain to the World

by Josep C. Verges

Communists and anarchists in their separate uniforms execute the bourgeoisie and priests in a Catalan cemetery during the Civil War. Unlike Hitler, only men were liquidated and most ran away to Europe, like Torres’ and my father, while women stayed on to save the family home. On the left the next batch and on the right children watching the extrajudicial murders. Below: Lleida’s Hotel Palacio, the former Palace Hotel, where the father of Josep Maria Torres stayed during the Second World War. He became the rescuer of English and American pilots downed in the III Reich and fled through the Pyrenees.

The Catalan bourgeoisie was never closed-minded, monolingual or insular. A tiny minority spoke Spanish, but also other languages, including Catalan. Once the dictatorship died they rapidly went back to the world before Franco. Josep Maria Torres dedicates his new book “Hotel Palacio, Lleida 1943, Scenes from the Civil War” (Abadia de Montserrat): “You will appreciate that I am less polemical than you.” But the Civil War is still politically incorrect.

His family comes from a long Catalan tradition, from the bishops Torres Amat to building the Palau de la Musica Catalana. They owned businesses in England, France, Rumania, Philippines, a few in Spain and many in Catalonia in transport, coal, hotels, shipping, petrol, ceramics, wine, jewelry, real estate, perfumes, fruit wholesalers. They were expropriated by the Fascists, by the Anarchists and by the Communists: “Expropriations were nothing new to the family.” Primo de Rivera expropriated them to creat the oil monopoly Campsa: “It goes without saying that like any dictator worth his salt, without one cent of compensation.” The Civil War came: “My family, like many others, found themselves involved without holding any special ideological views.” They traded with both sides, but shipping coal to Barcelona under an English flag to avoid expropriation. Franco gave more security: “When Gijon fell and the coal mine recovered , it was the first time anyone had given us back something.” Also the burning of 10,000 books, in the family since 1205, that “had even survived Napoleon’s invasion.” But “one thing was to be a Catalan with conservative or liberal beliefs and another very different to identify oneself with national-syndicalism, first cousin of national-socialism.” His grandfather “came back horrified from the national-socialist system, so far removed from his liberal ideas formed between the Catalan party Lliga and England.” The men were forced into exile to escape assassination, while the women stayed on. The Republic president Negrin installed his lover in their home: “Almost three months before the government was moved to Barcelona. The move from Madrid was not so last-minute, rather well-planned.” In 1943 his father was living at the Place Hotel in Lleida, renamed Palacio by the Spanish Fascists. Thanks to his English he represented the British consulate of Barcelona in the rescue of pilots. One day he had 20 Englishmen in the hotel. In the sixties Josep Maria Torres met me: “In Llafranc I met the son of the owner of the famous and intelligent magazine Destino. He was always a spur to my intelligence. His companionship made me think. One of the many books he has published, “Such an Unfortunate Country” (Catalonia obviously), made me realize that despite all that unites us in the love of our culture and a liberal view of politics, we diverge on Catalan. In those days I was happy without any ideological atavism. My Catalonia was not downtrodden by misfortune but fortunate. Certainly Catalonia has been discriminated but that’s life. We have lived through the longest period of peace. Isn’t this important? Don’t you think so?”